The following is pure speculation, I have no specific knowledge of mgmt intentions, but I think it's rational speculation.
We have a lot of threads about what will happen to Systems/Storage under AK. Let's face it, most of that division has little value to anybody outside IBM, other than as a "milk the maintenance" type business. There's really not much any other vendor would want.
IMO the most obvious disposal from Storage is Spectrum Scale. It can run on commodity datacenter hardware, it's available as software-only, it has a plausible path to containers/cloud, and frankly it doesn't have much competition in its areas of strength. The HPC/AI storage market is dominated by Scale and Lustre followed by a bunch of niche products with some cool technology not much market presence. It would be attractive to HPE, Lenovo, or Dell as a focused high-end complement to their more mainstream storage offerings and help them win profitable deals in HPC where they get to sell not only the storage but also masses of compute and networking hardware. Plus, Scale is kind of the "ugly duckling" of Storage, whose management understand much better hardware and block than software and file.
Add to that the fact that Lustre is now being a subsidiary of DDN, and nobody wants to even crack open the door to their accounts to DDN, and Scale becomes an attractive - although relatively small in the scheme of things - technology acquisition.